Stories about the past of Alan Milburn are now doing the rounds of the intra-left email lists. For anyone who missed it, he has returned to government to take up the Cabinet post of Election Planner (co-ordinating rosette colours and MPs ties?)
One of the email postings recalls:
“[In 1982] Alan Milburn was the manager of the “Days of Hope” Trotskyist-leaning bookshop in Newcastle upon Tyne… the nickname “haze of dope” for the bookshop was dreamt up by a CP mature student at Newcastle Poly and the name stuck.”
Could this be the same Milburn who, according to Roy Hattersley, “describes ‘the project’ [i.e. Blairism] with admirable clarity and is incapable of writing an election manifesto without drawing the battle lines of the philosophical struggle.”
No more dulled thinking for old-new boy Milburn…